Photographing a life Tina Barney to discuss photography career at Community Library Andy Kerstetter Dec 27, 2017 Photographer Tina Barney is known for her large-scale, color portraits of her family and close friends, many of whom are well-to-do inhabitants of New York and New England. “Once I started, my curiosity has never…

By Judith Freeman / Published March 25, 2017 – Los Angeles Review of Books I ONCE OWNED a dress I loved so much that every time I wore it, I felt like an actress in a French New Wave film. The dress was red, a perfect Titian red, with a close fitting bodice and full skirt,…

Judith Freeman selects and reviews the five best books on Mormons and Mormonism for the Wall Street Journal. Read the article here Five Best: Judith Freeman on Mormons and Mormonism Sept. 30, 2016 1:02 p.m. ET Ms. Freeman is the author, most recently, of ‘The Latter Days: A Memoir.’ No Man Knows My History…

Judith Freeman uses a famous quote from Czeslaw Milosz on the last page of her new memoir, “The Latter Days”: “When a writer is born into a family,” Milosz said, “the family is finished.” It’s tempting to buy into such literary fatalism after reading Freeman’s account of her life as a stylish young rebel in…

At twenty-two, Judith Freeman was working in the LDS Church-owned department store in the Utah town where she’d grown up. In the process of divorcing the man she had married at seventeen, she was living in her parents’ house with her four-year old son, who had already endured two heart surgeries. She had abandoned Mormonism,…

Welcome to the official website of Judith Freeman, author of the following works of fiction:Family Attractions, The Chinchilla Farm, A Desert of Pure Feeling, Red Water, and the nonfiction book: The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and The Woman He Loved.

Her memoir, The Latter Days, published in 2016 by Pantheon Books, was called a "must-read memoir" by the Chicago Tribune, and selected as one of NPR's best books of the year.

Here are a few early reactions to this new book:

"The Latter Days,written with thoughtful, hard-won honesty, is the record of a girl growing up in a closed society rigidly governed by a male religious hierarchy-a profoundly undemocratic system that claims to embody American values. Painfully but with no rancor, Freeman makes vivid the security of belonging and the rewards of obedience, the costs of security and obedience, and the rewards and costs of seeking freedom. A brave and valuable book." - Ursula K Le Guin, author ofTheLeftHand of Darkness

"A poignant, searching memoir of self-discovery." - Kirkus Reviews

"An affecting and tender memoir." - Ron Carlson

"A beautiful, surprising, elegant memoir" - Janet Fitch

What Critics Are Saying About The Long Embrace:

“Compelling . . . Ms. Freeman knows Los Angeles as well as Marlowe himself . . . Like Cissy, when she crooks her finger, it’s impossible not to follow.” - The New York Times

“Aches with emotion and loneliness. . . Until now, no other book has made us view this great American writer afresh.” - Los Angeles Times

“May be the essential book on Raymond Chandler. Like his books, it offers a rational solution to a puzzle while at the same time retaining a sense of mystery.” - Chicago Tribune

“Complex and delicate . . . enthralled and enthralling . . The Long Embrace is one of the literary events of the year.” - Los Angeles Magazine

“Atmospheric and unusual . . . A restless hallucination of a book about a woman obsessed by a mystery that she knows she will never solve—and perhaps does not wish to solve.” - The New York Review of Books

Photographing a life Tina Barney to discuss photography career at Community Library Andy Kerstetter Dec 27, 2017 Photographer Tina Barney is known for her large-scale, color portraits of her family and close friends, many of whom are well-to-do inhabitants of New York and New England. “Once I started, my curiosity has never…

By Judith Freeman / Published March 25, 2017 – Los Angeles Review of Books I ONCE OWNED a dress I loved so much that every time I wore it, I felt like an actress in a French New Wave film. The dress was red, a perfect Titian red, with a close fitting bodice and full skirt,…

Judith Freeman selects and reviews the five best books on Mormons and Mormonism for the Wall Street Journal. Read the article here Five Best: Judith Freeman on Mormons and Mormonism Sept. 30, 2016 1:02 p.m. ET Ms. Freeman is the author, most recently, of ‘The Latter Days: A Memoir.’ No Man Knows My History…

Judith Freeman uses a famous quote from Czeslaw Milosz on the last page of her new memoir, “The Latter Days”: “When a writer is born into a family,” Milosz said, “the family is finished.” It’s tempting to buy into such literary fatalism after reading Freeman’s account of her life as a stylish young rebel in…

At twenty-two, Judith Freeman was working in the LDS Church-owned department store in the Utah town where she’d grown up. In the process of divorcing the man she had married at seventeen, she was living in her parents’ house with her four-year old son, who had already endured two heart surgeries. She had abandoned Mormonism,…